On Monday, October 22, 2018 at 3:20:01 AM UTC+1, N8N wrote:
On Saturday, October 20, 2018 at 7:11:15 AM UTC-4, Andre Jute wrote:
The sort of person who today might want a Patek Philippe watch usually already knows that they are at the peak of the pile for good reasons. As an example, my first Patek was the thinnest automatic wris****ch in the world, a triumph of design and construction.

Another way of putting it is that Patek Philippe had already been a watch for people of refinement for a hundred years when a Rolex was still a sturdy watch for farmers,

*divers. seriously. Although I have a serious jones for a Blancpain Fifty Fathoms just to be different (the other serious contender for "first practical dive watch"). The one from that pile (although behind the curve by a decade or so) that I actually *have* is a Vostok Amphibia, because for $30 give or take the Russians managed to also produce a functional dive watch but without all the precision machining, but it still *functioned* which is an achievement of a different sort and equally admirable. Shame they didn't figure out lumed hands and indices or a ratcheting bezel at the same time; personally I'd be terrified to actually use it as a primary diving timekeeping tool, but still.

nate

I forgot to mention -- The Russians had only, or possibly two, watch factories. One of them made pocket watches, the other one wris****ches, so this watch that a fellow showed me probably came from the same factory as your Vostok Amphibia. It was a pilot's stopwatch with an E6 rotary "flight computer" printed around the outside of the dial. The whole thing was dressed up to look, at a first quick shortsighted glance, like a Willy Breitling special that lived a life of hard knocks. The kicker was that the buttons for the stopwatch did nothing, and the rotary slide rule didn't rotate...It was issued to pilots. This fellow told me most of the Russian pilots craved a posting to East Germany because there they might find a good watch, made in East Germany.

Remember that you can use either junction as the cold one. You don't care
in what direction the current flows. All you need is a differential.
Using germanium you can get away with really low voltages.

The direction of the gradient isn't the issue. The absence of a gradient
(hey, everything inside my body is at body temperature!) is the problem.
Switching to a low band-gap semiconductor doesn't help.

I saw a news item once about a scheme to use sound waves to power implanted
electronics like pacemakers. I imagined the resulting headline - "He died
quietly."

One might rate cars on aesthetics, pure speed, maintenance
(blood and treasure, as they say) and so on, but for pure
exhilarating pleasure at speed, I'd return to the early
series BMW 2002 (before they got too heavy to corner well).

You haven't experienced speed until you've stood on the drawbar
of a Farmall Model C doing ten miles an hour on a gravel road.

Hey! I've done that too.

Don't you have to be barefooted to get the full benefit?

Maybe so, but I got all the benefit I wanted with shoes on.

Yikes!

You wore shoes "back on the farm"? It must have been winter :-)
--
Cheers

On Monday, October 22, 2018 at 4:51:03 AM UTC-4, Andre Jute wrote:
On Monday, October 22, 2018 at 3:20:01 AM UTC+1, N8N wrote:
On Saturday, October 20, 2018 at 7:11:15 AM UTC-4, Andre Jute wrote:
The sort of person who today might want a Patek Philippe watch usually already knows that they are at the peak of the pile for good reasons. As an example, my first Patek was the thinnest automatic wris****ch in the world, a triumph of design and construction.

Another way of putting it is that Patek Philippe had already been a watch for people of refinement for a hundred years when a Rolex was still a sturdy watch for farmers,

*divers. seriously. Although I have a serious jones for a Blancpain Fifty Fathoms just to be different (the other serious contender for "first practical dive watch"). The one from that pile (although behind the curve by a decade or so) that I actually *have* is a Vostok Amphibia, because for $30 give or take the Russians managed to also produce a functional dive watch but without all the precision machining, but it still *functioned* which is an achievement of a different sort and equally admirable. Shame they didn't figure out lumed hands and indices or a ratcheting bezel at the same time; personally I'd be terrified to actually use it as a primary diving timekeeping tool, but still.

nate

Heh-heh. I wouldn't risk my life on it either. It costs about four times that much just to put in a new o-ring and a smear of silicon grease and put my dive watch in a pressure tank for 200m rectification. Not that I've ever dived to 200m...

Andre Jute
A man should know his limits. -- Dirty Harry Callahan

If you care about such things you should read up on the case design of the Amphibia - uses the same principle as a "Super Compressor" case. Very elegant and simple and best of all (for the Russians) did not rely on precision machining.